Mind Games
by AmethystB
Summary: After Luc died, she hated him. A pure hate, savage and unadulterated.


**A/N: **This was an idea that came from a prompt from cherrygurl1225: Jack saves Tru from some kind of trauma. It's been a long time coming and has gone through many a change, but here it is!

I do not own _Tru Calling_, I'd have made a Kickstarter for its belated renewal by now if I did.

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**Mind Games**

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After Luc died, she hated him. A pure hate, savage and unadulterated. Sometimes she couldn't breathe and it was the hardest thing to pull herself from the ground when she'd collapse. She would stand, her body shaking, and have to hold herself against the vanity. She'd look at herself in the mirror, dark curls un-brushed, hazel eyes inflamed, and there she declared her hate. Over and over until it felt real.

"Jack, I will never forgive you."—a whisper through clenched teeth, so poisoned with rage she could barely hear it.

Once she broke her mirror. For an hour she stood before it, the recitation rolling thick off her tongue—"I hate him, I hate him."—and she saw his face, not a serious face but not a smiling one either, the liminal façade of a man in between. He stared into her, poring over the grief in her eyes like he was studying its every horrible feature, with neither sympathy nor pleasure, and she hated him more for not choosing a side. Wasn't he after all her enemy?

"_I take no pleasure from being right."_

"Then why'd you do it, you son of a bitch!"

Her bloodied fist shook violently afterwards, broken glass reflecting fragments of her face as she looked down into the sink. Blood ran vertical down her arm and dripped soundlessly to the tiles below. No, there must have been sound but she didn't hear it—everything was shattered, all she heard was the world breaking.

Then their lives became a game. She won sometimes, he others. But the world was still broken and she didn't have fun. The game, a hedge maze—false exits and dead ends, live wires dangling above and snaking below—and at the end of it pain waited.

Salvation came with Jensen. He made her laugh, his kiss was electric and she wanted him. But he died. He died doing something for _her_, and Tru couldn't let that be his legacy. The day rewound, she brought him back to life without him asking for her, and there Jack was, a death rattle waiting in the shadows.

"_There are consequences, Tru."_

She wouldn't listen. Not after what she'd gone through with Luc. She wouldn't lose Jensen the same way.

But something was different this time, Jensen hadn't asked for help. He hadn't wanted to live again. He began to act differently. It was Christmas Eve, he met Tru inside a church and the black he wore sheltered a dark truth. The glow from a candle lit his face but the rest of him was in shadow. When he blew out the candle, Tru asked who it had been for.

"Nobody."

One night, in bed, she dreamed but in the dream Jensen began to rot. His skin dried, blackened and melted away against bone until a skeletal Jensen flexed thin milky fingers and held her by the throat. He strangled the life out of her, and when she woke with a start there he was, staring at her with eyes hollow as black holes.

"You talk in your sleep."

She gently laughed and turned from him, but didn't fall back asleep. She suspected neither did Jensen.

One night in July she decided she needed to kill him. She'd followed him, from a seedy bar to a back alley where she'd watched as he bludgeoned an off-duty surgeon to death. He wasn't the same Jensen he'd been before he died; now he was a murderous, soulless beast.

A phantom without place, Jack appeared beside her.

"You see? Consequences."

It took her two days to come to him. "Help me, Jack."

She broke down in front of him when he told her it was done. Fell to her knees in front of his and wept, holding herself in front of a mirror personified. She'd asked Jack to murder someone; she was a murderer.

He didn't comfort her until he was sure she'd let him. He knelt down, tops of his knees touching hers on the floor, and wrapped his arms around her convulsing body. He took her convulsions like voltage through his body, and stayed that way with her until she was empty.

One week later she returned to work. She surrounded herself with dead bodies because she deserved it. She performed her duties, stayed from eleven at night to five in the morning and barely spoke to Davis when she saw him. She didn't bother about her other job. Just let Jack win every time.

But Jack wasn't concerned about that job anymore. He'd done something for her that changed the face of their forty-eight hour clock, magically opened an exit in the maze.

He walked into the morgue one night, just after twelve on a Friday.

"You're not supposed to be here."

Her voice a monotone. She barely looked up from a chest cavity.

He stepped towards her, a predator cautious of its prey. "You haven't told them yet."

"Please leave."

Jack watched her clinically peel blue latex from her hands, pockets of blood folding inside. She removed her goggles but kept her labcoat tight around her, the white to his black sweater.

"You can't keep up this façade forever, Tru. You can try to be strong for so long but it'll come crashing down. You can't always be the heroine of your own story."

"Do you think this is easy for me?" she snapped at him, hate awakened like some dormant monster rising. "I _hate _this, living like this!"

"Better than living with whatever Jensen became."

He was close now and pulled her closer with a strong hand on her arm. He made her focus on his eyes.

"Tru, you did the right thing, the only thing you could do. You can't punish yourself like this. You need to let the people who love you help you."

When his eyes softened Tru felt something she'd never felt before, an unnamed feeling she couldn't place. She watched abjectly as Jack trailed his hand up her arm slowly, over her neck to rest gently on her cheek. He brushed a curl away from her eyes with his fingertips, and Tru shivered though his hands were not cold.

Faced with her mirror, the familiar recitation raced through her mind. _I hate you, I hate you_. But with his fingers stroking her skin as softly as anyone had ever done, Tru couldn't say it. It didn't feel real anymore. Something else had taken its place, a liminal abstract thought that ran a symmetrical line against her hate.

Instead what she said was—"Help me, Jack."—and he held her close.


End file.
